This review coming to you from inside the fucking wall of Blue Mountain Zone, which I clipped through several days ago. Please send help! There's something in here with me!!

If there's two things I love in this world, it's kart racers and complaining about Sonic the Hedgehog. You might view that as a problem, but I don't have a friend group that tells me things like "George, you're loved, you don't need to play Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers." Nope, it's just me and my brain, so with the help of my instructor, Jim Beam, I finally buckled down and spent an hour getting my class Robotnik operating license in Ring Racers' infamously long tutorial.

While the experience of jumping into Ring Racers has been streamlined after the game's first major patch, I would still encourage anyone who wants to pick it up to go through each lesson in the tutorial. Ring Racers is the most technical kart racer I've played in my life, and that might strike you as being a bit funny considering it's essentially Sonic Kart, but keep in mind this was made by Sonic fans, and those people are psychopaths. You'll want to know the ins and outs of your vehicle and what it's capable of before hitting up the Grand Prix, and though I've seen a number of people complain about it, I see the wisdom of blocking off the online mode until you clear the first cup. I can't imagine what it would look like if players skipped the tutorial and jumped headfirst into multiplayer, but I'm gonna guess it'd be a disaster for everyone involved.

I'm confident in that considering half of the single player experience could also be characterized as "a disaster." Managing ring consumption, learning where sneakers spawn to break shortcut barriers, understanding how to maximize your 3rd-tier drift burst, anticipating when you should "hold" your cart rather than drift, figuring out where and when to use your spindash... it's a lot to manage even without all the stage hazards and player-laid traps that are out to straight up kill you. Pico Park is my god damn storming of Normandy, I've seen people lose limbs on the straightaway, and good men stretched to the width of an atom after colliding directly with a Drop Target that bounced them back into the path of a Gardentop careening around the corner at maximum velocity.

Even the pre-race is a nightmare. You don't just line up all nice and neat like in Super Mario Kart, patiently waiting for the green light. You can roam freely so long as you don't cross the starting line, which means you can also bump into other players and force them over the line to penalize them. I said Pico Park was a nightmare, but I didn't even survive the first three seconds of Carnival Night Zone, because everyone kept bumping me into hazards in the pre-race, and when I was sucked into the magnetized tunnel that serves as the track's opening straight, I was flung directly into several hazards that caused my kart to explode. I died and I barely made a single input.

For the last week you could find me hunched over my laptop, drenched with sweat because it's 80 degrees here at night and my computer is overheating, gripping my controller and hissing "fuck you, FUCK YOU," and you might assume I'm not having a good time... but I am. Despite how chaotic and complex and downright vicious this game can be, I'm into it.

Maybe I'm just in the market for the kind of depth and sadism Ring Racers offers, or maybe I've played so many kart racers that the problem I'm having is that they don't have enough esoteric bullshit in them. Mastering Ring Racers' mechanics is satisfying, but understanding how they play off one another achieves an even greater high... I've graduated to a stronger drug. Naturally, courses are constructed around these systems in a way that's both mindful of low- and high-level play, and the loop of replaying tracks and developing better strategies to maximize your ring consumption and attain better clear times feels good, with few exceptions (Balloon Park and Blue Mountain can eat me.)

I really like the visual design of the game, too. The stylized menus, expressive character art, and detailed tracks all lend a high level of production to the game that's genuinely impressive for a fan game born out of a fan game born out of a fan game using the Doom engine. It can be difficult to parse the action sometimes, especially in levels with more unconventional color pallets, but I think the game has a look to it that really makes it stand out while feeling like an authentic progression from Sonic Robo Blast 2's aesthetic. I will add that this is one case where IGDB fucked up by allowing a cleaner thumbnail, though. I prefer the original, which looked like a magazine scan of a grainy off-screen photo taken at a CES. Much more fitting, if you ask me.

Of course, like everyone else, I still have issues with Ring Racers that I think really sour the experience. The pandemonium of the aforementioned pre-race wears out very quickly, with stage outs and starting line penalties becoming more annoying than humorous, especially given how long it can take to recover. There's also a lives system which feels wholly unnecessary when you consider that the capsule minigames that appear every two races could otherwise be used as checkpoints if you don't place high enough in a circuit to advance. The trick system is also interesting in concept but utilized so rarely that I often forgot it was a thing until I needed to exploit it, and I typically found myself fumbling it as a result.

I've said before that Sonic fan games are in something of a golden age, with hobbyist-led projects being of a caliber that genuinely blows me away. Credit where it's due, Sega appears quite comfortable with letting fans create games like this without interference, something I think has helped give the scene space to mature and which has helped to keep Sonic so relevant. Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers' kinetic gameplay and strong art direction impressed me the moment I saw it, and I think there's a lot of potential in introducing a higher level of technicality to a kart racer, but it does need some adjusting in places and falls a bit short of its promise.

Addendum: Apparently the game also controlled worse pre-patch so I may be benefitting by having waited just a bit to really dive into it. Seems worth mentioning.

An extremely smart intersection of mechanics from orthodox Resident Evil and orthodox Silent Hill, very little in Signalis feels wholly new but the craft with which it's deployed contextualizes it in a new way. The burn mechanic (destroy a corpse or it will return to life eventually) is borrowed from REGCN, but it allows Signalis to make its infrequent and out-of-the-way save points risky to get to and from, recreating an emergent version of RE's iconic save economy despite the use of SH-style save points.

My favorite mechanical consequence is the way the strict 6-item inventory limit forces players to create their own ad hoc class. Sure, there are items that can heal you fast, items that can heal for a lot, items that can heal automatically—but when you're moving into a new room and you need three spare inventory slots just in case, you can only choose one. You can only choose one weapon as well, and you may have to choose between bringing any healing at all or a torch to dispose of corpses. How you do so defines your character and your experience of the game as surely as any stat selection.

Now THIS is the epitome of classicvania. A sort of reimagining of the first Castlevania, this game perfects the formula that is known as classicvania.

All issues I had with the last 3 games are addressed here. The controls are PERFECT. Simon controls so well it doesn't feel like you're controlling a brick anymore. You now have directional whipping which is a godsend and made otherwise difficult scenarios more manageable.

The difficulty is just right. If you're somewhat familiar with this games, you should be able to beat this on your first playthough without any struggles, but you will still die and face some challenges. Only bullshit section is the final boss. I felt like that was even harder than Castlevania 1's final boss. But every other level and boss is just well balanced and designed, nothing feels too cheap when you die. This game has some of the coolest and most creative looking levels in the series.

The music and graphics are phenomenal. Some of the best most hype music in the series so far. Especially when you are in the castle and a lot of the tracks are just throwback remixes. So good. The game itself looks great and effects when whipping and killing enemies are so crunchy and satisfying.

Super Castlevania IV is easily my favorite of the classicvania games (of which I've played so far), and of my now top 10 SNES games of all time.

HOT TAKE OF THE CENTURY - METROID PRIME 2 IS JUST AS GOOD AS THE FIRST ONE.

Now granted - this is assuming some stuff about the way you're playing. There's three pretty massive issues that can stop plenty of people from enjoying this one.

1) AWFUL save placement in Agon Wastes - I just used save states during that part, but if you don't use them this is probably so much more painful.
2) Dark World draining your health - Don't wait until your health is all the way back up!! There's health pickups everywhere!! Don't be a coward!!
3) Both starting areas are pretty gray - If you can't have me at my Temple Grounds, you don't deserve me at my Sanctuary Fortress. 😙

But aside from the above? My GOD I loved this game. There's so many little improvements from the first.

Big open rooms that make the planet feel less claustrophobic, while still keeping things tight and tense when the devs want to mix things up. Dramatically more unique area theming, meaning you get way more than just the "ice area" or "lava area" of Prime 1. World design that uses ESPECIALLY creative vertical and interconnected maps compared to the "hallway" approach of the first game. Different beams that actually require some on-the-fly strategy to mess with. World progression that's convenient to navigate AND avoids having the solution be a room you forgot about on the opposite side of the planet (most of the time). Tons more focus on kinetic movement! Making Samus feel so much more powerful at the end compared to the start!! The Dark World genuinely making you feel powerless and spooked!! Actually fun bosses!!! (most of the time).

Even the ability to use mouse and keyboard on PrimeHack was such an improvement for my overall immersion...I wish I could use this control scheme for the first game's remaster. It's SO good.

I think there's some totally fair points against Echoes, like the Dark World's areas totally blending together, dimension hopping being fairly underbaked, the love-it-or-hate-it implementation of Zelda elements, and some pretty tanky enemies here and there. I also can't ignore the fact that emulation and some minor cheats - like automatically skipping the world transition cutscenes - definitely impacted my time with it, and in a more "vanilla" play-through I probably would be much more annoyed.

But even with those in mind...I still think Echoes deserves way more love. It's easily the most underrated entry in the Metroid series, and with some minor fixes, it's JUST as fun as the first Prime entry. IMAGINE what this game could look like with an official remaster!!

I'm eating SO good as a new-ish Metroid fan wowwww.

It's ugly to look at, it's clumsy to play, the AI is stupid as rocks, the economy is bad, the music and voice work are incomplete and repetitive, and it's probably the very best medieval warlord rpg you'll ever play. Hundreds of scholars and game designers and larpers have all collectively spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours laboring in vain to create something even half as visceral and authentic as the experience of exhaustedly flailing away at a hundred shit covered peasants with a battle axe brought to us by this game.

Why can nobody else learn anything from what this game has taught us? How has nobody made mounted combat feel even half as good as this? How has nobody made spears and halberds even a little bit as fun to play with? Perhaps the off-putting and janky exterior of this game serves as a protective armor that keeps it safely hidden, the most precious secret of the Turks.